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Thanks for the reply, but can you see how the very simple configuration possible on the DHCP server suddenly becomes much much more complicated with the above solutions? You're basically suggesting I run a chef server (or some other central workstation management) in my home to allow talking to machines on my local domain by hostnames.

That's tough to swallow.

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Is your setup actually likely to run into situations where the DNS server is unavailable but Internet access is otherwise working? Basic home setups usually have DNS running (if at all) on the same device (router) that’s also acting as a gateway, so such a selective outage would be unlikely except in the event of misconfiguration - and in that case I’d want my setup to fail hard, personally, so I’d know to fix it, rather than having it silently slow down DNS lookups. Thus I wouldn’t intentionally set a public DNS server as an alternative to the primary one on the router. But maybe your setup is more complex, or you have a use case I’m not thinking of...

I run DNS on my file server since it's on all the time anyway. It must fail gracefully or the wife approval factor goes down.

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